Internal AOL Email Announcing About.Me Acquisition

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We’re part of the AOL family here at TechCrunch, but they don’t trust us with much actual information. We don’t get the emails sent out to all employees, for example. So when I get my hands on one I certainly don’t feel bad about posting it here.

I love that they link to my about.me profile at the very end, but don’t trust us with the email. Probably a good call, actually.

AOLers –

Facebook, Twitter and others have demonstrated how profound the ability to express and manage your identity is on the internet. As we continue to evolve our consumer experiences, we want to deliver a ground breaking approach to managing your identity – within AOL and beyond. It’s about more than just your Facebook or Twitter profiles, it’s about your entire online identity and providing consumers with the ability to express themselves and their individuality. If done well, this can have a tremendously positive impact on our advertising and content strategy, marrying your social graph with your “interest graph” to create a dramatically more relevant experience for consumers.

I’ll be sharing more about our vision in this area in the months ahead, but as a critical step in this journey, I’m incredibly excited to announce that Tony Conrad and the about.me team are joining the AOL family!

Just recently launched to the public, about.me is a site that ties users social networking profiles including Linkedin, Twitter, Email, personal blogs and more, all together in one place. In addition, it provides analytics allowing users to track how many people viewed their profile pages and which social networks they went on to view from there – appealing to the increasingly vain online audience! C’mon…who doesn’t want to know how many people have viewed their profile pages, status updates, photos and more?!

I encourage you all to check out about.me, the tremendous roster of notable early adopters already using about.me and build your profile! Here’s mine: about.me/bradgarlinghouse. It’s an incredibly well executed consumer experience and the future direction of the social web. While last week we saw competitors closing down innovative products, we’re playing offense and building next generation web experiences for consumers.

Tony Conrad is not only one of the most innovative, inspiring and influential people in Silicon Valley, he’s also a former AOLer and we’re lucky to have him back at the company. He and the team will be based in Palo Alto and Tony will report directly to me.